Daliesque Dreamscapes etc...

In the break room

The coins never tumbled from
His mouth like slot machine levers
More like a few good blueberries placed
in a bucket at a berry picking session.
He was tired of checking his accounts,
transferring his worries to save his sanity.
There were few new books to be had for the arts
if we were too eat as well.
He ripped into peanut butter sandwiches,
chicken nuggets over brown rice,
a ziploc bag of sliced almonds...
Was it quitting time, time to quit
or merely to relinquish ones duties
to the slum lord and find another one?
He does not know how to win arguments
or haggle when hunger pangs hit
and he can no longer yell at the public
who totally disregard the signs,
the carefully plotted words
you go through one by one
like an instruction manual.
He will bury them in a pile a paper
he will never look at again
until it is time to go on the road...

A Rough Draft....(Ok little Monets out there Aren't we all Though)

A Rough Draft…

I live in the gap between boarding and exiting
and the vexation of never being able to walk
through steel like a ghost.

I told you I don’t drink anymore. I’ve made
adjustments to my consciousness and although
there are many holes in my plot and it’s useless
to stop time and fix what is shattered or broken
I keep urgently forcing my words, my intentions,
my projections upon you…

I’m not an act or even if the camera shining in
my eyes tells me so, I’m just being myself .
No one holds cigarettes like I do with thumb
and forefinger out of some dime store novel
alleyway. No one downs a beer as if beaten
back by heat and gulping as if a glass of chilled
water in desert glare.

I don’t drink anymore but to stare off a massacre
I must go to Otto’s Shrunken Head and blow up
the lonely person’s head I know until it is healthy
and lucid.

Yet, I see blood in her sight and wonder how it does
not make her blind. She smiles at me and tells me
to join her at the bar for drinks. She orders one of
those drinks that makes you believe you are some
kind of tropical island vacation when you are actually
in a retro bar on the cusp of spring in Manhattan
to watch some amateur stand-up comedy all the while
managing to keep your food down.

I am not miracle on 34th street but I pay my rent to the
Bronx. I hopscotch over the dog shit down my streets
and avenues. Each and every morning my brain is like
a scrambled egg oozing out of an overly buttered roll
and down my chins staining my shirt. I am sardonic in
a can of half peeled opened eyes fluttering as I push my
way through the automatic doors, and hope I wake up
in a semi-conscious state somewhere new…

I will follow you and sit down and feign giggling just to
stave off a massacre. You ask how am I? What am I up to?
I say, which one? I feel obligated to save her and everyone else
excluding myself from repetitive destruction, from history. I am
not an impasse in a relationship. I must be selfish, not annoyed
and put these grating apprehensions out of my mind. I can save
myself from insanity….

by Micah Zevin 2011-2012

Keep plugging away even while attempting not to trip into the cesspool....